The Structures, The Fountain, And the Offline raids.

[Calaranis Ordo 0]

OK so in the game with this new update I know what the devs were trying to solve: They were trying to make it so that superstructures in PVP were very hard to make. People using tames were making massive structures easily in a matter of days. These structures were very hard to raid and easy to defend which is why the newest feature is the stone structure nerf. As a person who loves building in this game for PVP I believe along with many others that the devs handled it in the worst possible way that they could. they made it so an entire structure tier AKA stone is useless and not viable for actual pvp. Since they require things like paste and their defensibility Is WORSE than wood atm and wood is still very bad. 

 

Wood unlike stone can be torn through with a pickaxe easily, although it is cheaper and resistant to explosives THAT FACT DOES NOT CHANGE; not in the slightest. that means that wood which is the only viable building material will be attacked by guys with picks and no one will build stone to deal with that because the players will just blow it away without effort. In simple terms building anything is now pointless. To compound the issue many players will have to travel for sap or metal in order to build these crappy stone buildings. (side note: before anyone says “But Calaranis NPCs are now invulnerable behind a puckle gun” that buff to puckle guns is irrelevant the devs did not and could not make the emplacement itself invulnerable. Thus, they are vulnerable to cannon fire which makes puckles useless even with the buff for outside defenses.)

 

So now you devs and players who might read this know the problem if you didn’t already. So what should the fix be? It I think and you should to that another tier of structure should be made, something like reinforced stone structures which have difficult mats. The stone buildings needed to be nerfed but they were nerfed so hard that they simply are not viable in PVP. This new tier would make stone more viable while at the same time building an unstoppable defense VERY hard. It would solve the problem that the devs were trying to solve while simultaneously making structures useful. As for the wood changes they need to revert to their previous form and be bad because the crafting requirements for them are very cheap. If you the devs wanted to make wood stronger then make it an optional thing for more resources. For example, there could be the option to pitch wood in saps so that it is stronger and more resistant to fire.

 

As for attacking if you, the devs want to make it take less time and be more viable add more effective raiding methods. At the moment we are limited to grenades, cannons, siege weapons, and pickaxes for destroying enemy structures. There should be more and they need to be more effective and expensive. One good idea that I think would fit the bill is a big armored battering ram. Something that is very slow to get to structures and is quite expensive. This thing could be pulled by horses or even players into position. The drawbacks in game to using a battering ram would be the resources required and the speed at which the thing moves. I think that should something like this be made it should cause a slowing debuff to whatever is moving it around. That way the defenders can be given the opportunity to defend and fight it off. However conversely this ram should hit like a truck and shatter even those high tier walls I spoke of above once it is put into position.

 

As for offline defense, we all know and agree that holding what you have built while offline unless you are with a clan is impossible. That is the facts when you are one or even five guys making anything last is impossible. You devs have implemented the change to npcs that make them invulnerable on puckle guns. First off that is very unoriginal you have simply made auto turrets but in atlas. Not only that it is ineffective. The puckle is not invulnerable, cannons will shred it in very few shots making this change pointless. All one has to do is get a cannon cart and get an angle on the gun the blow it away.

 

A better solution which fits better in the game can be found in conan. These NPCs these mercenaries are not animals they are people. Why are you treating them like they are? I mean they are basically a tiger that can man a gun or sail THAT IS IT. Why not make them smarter and allow them to do things like patrol your defenses with a gun and or a sword, or perhaps take over guns when they are under attack to shoot at enemies of their own free will. This game is not ark not at all it is atlas, a pirate game that is intended to have primitive style things like sailing ships and swords and muskets. Why do you devs insist on adding in ineffective auto turrets? Fighting Npcs while raiding would be so much cooler than dealing with what truly amounts to auto turrets. All it would take is a structure that acts as a checkpoint for NPC crew that they walk to in sequence. So, you set down one marker and set down another then another and assign armed npcs on them. They will then move from marker to marker along that route and, depending on their settings, attacking any enemies they encounter on that path. Perhaps you could even add in a system that causes nearby npcs to join the fight when one gets agroed on an enemy kind of like an alarm system. Honestly there are a great many possibilities with a system like that it could become a whole skill tree called maybe something like commanding or generaling.

 

As for the aging process in Atlas personally, I don’t think that it should be a feature at all due to the debuffs and things to that nature but others and you the devs disagree. At the very least this “feature” needs a massive overhaul and I KNOW that everyone agrees on that. The current system penalizes the player if they do not spend sometimes in upwards of 48 hours of time hunting down the Fountain of Youth (FOY). These debuffs are not as bad as they once were but they are still debilitating especially for the casual players who don’t have the time to go and do the FOY. This creates an environment in which us the players either spend very nearly our every waking moment on atlas, create a new character, or play for only a month at a time. All of which are very bad. To fix this without getting rid of the whole system I think the ageing system needs to be a one-time problem. What I mean is that the players only must do the Fountain of youth once per character and then they no longer need it again. This makes sense logically to me because it makes the players immortal and youthful with regards to old age just like the actual mythic fountain could do according to legend. With regards to the fountain itself in its current state it is not an interesting difficult dungeon. It is what we ark survival evolved players call a suicide cave. Basically, the cave is so difficult and overpopulated with creatures that there is no point in doing it with gear. You will inevitably lose it simply because of the death hoard that blocks the cave. So, you get a spawn point outside of the cave and create a bed spawn point and run in naked and hope that you grab the fountain. Any other way is a waste of resources because you a guaranteed many deaths before accomplishing you mission. THIS IS BORING, THIS IS A MASSIVE DEPRESSING GRIND. Not only do you have to get through the cave itself you also have to go through the chore of browsing reddit to even find the current location of the fountain. This is not adding anything fun into the game it feels like it is there for no reason. So I think that you should make a dedicated DETAILED dungeon for the FOY not a cave filled with hoards of unstoppable or nearly unstoppable beasts. For good performance at this dungeon you could even make it a separate instanced area that gets loaded in. That way it isn’t lagging to the point of unplayability at the entrance to these things. For variety you could even make the cave in part randomly generated. Another idea is making it so players have the choice to do it whenever they are over age 90 to “renew their strength and get another stack of fountain buff. all I know In its current state aging thing is terrible please fix it.

 

I would like to say that I am hard on this game because I enjoy it and see its potential. I do not want to insult the developers of this game; rather I want to see change in this game that sends it in the right direction for greatness before the player base dies.

 

 

I hope that any dev that reads this gives my ideas thought and implements at the very least the structure fix.

 

Players of ATLAS who read this Upvote if you believe this is good and spread the link to this the more attention this gets the more likely things change. Maybe what I said isn’t the end all solution but we at the very least need to get the conversation going and fast. In the comments tell me what you think, tell me any solutions to these issues that you think would work.